Thoughts on the Neil Diamond concert

I'm going to start this post with a bit of the background story to this fandom. I have liked Neil Diamond since I was 11 and he was always going to be the first concert I ever went to. This belief although I thought very little of at the time seemed right. The trouble was I couldn't afford the ticket price until after I had left college. I was hoping to go and see Neil on his 2008 tour but I spent too much money on holiday in Edinburgh and could no longer afford to go. I was really annoyed but vowed that I'd go and see him next time he toured. I ended up seeing Snow Patrol first but wasn't all that worried about it because I wasn't a particularly huge fan of the band in the first place. Neil still had his share of my fangirl love. This love however, was shared with another singer, who I had liked since I was 13. I definately wanted to see Neil in concert before this guy as Neil had been my idol for longer but this guy had just released his tour dates and I wasn't going to miss out on the opportunity to see him as I had done with Neil. After all there was no guarantee on how far into the future these two singers would be touring for. I booked the tickets and really enjoyed this other singer's show. He captured and held on to my attention and as I was leaving the show I just had that 'wow' feeling. Neil would have a hard job to beat this other singer.

Six months on, I'm preparing to go to Neil's show. I'm really excited to finally be able to go and see Neil in concert and I was starstruck at the thought of being in the same room as a real legend. I didn't have very good seats to start with but I hoped that the atmosphere would be enough. On arrival at the arena, I discover just how far back my seats were and they're second row from the back. The view was slightly better than I was imagining and there were video screens too. We ended up being moved forward eight rows or something because there were empty seats but that didn't really make much difference. Neil was about 15 minutes late on stage and opened with Soolaimon, which is not one of my favourite songs but it was followed up with Beautiful Noise which is. He was in good voice and chatted to the audience, telling the stories behind the songs and joking. I was pleased that the majority of the songs in the set were older songs as they're far more lively than the new stuff. The audience who had floor seats were stood up and dancing but because I was further back, and sat near some older people who wouldn't have stood up I had to stay sat down or else they wouldn't have been able to see. After the show was over I left the arena without that 'wow' feeling I was hoping for and coming to the conclusion that it was something I wouldn't be doing again.

That night I was feeling guilty the other singer's show was on my mind again and I realised that there may have been some sub-conscious reason I wanted to see Neil first and thinking about it now, the other singer raised the bar so high for my expectations out of a show that it would have been very hard for anyone to beat. It disheartened me in a way that it might have affected my enjoyment of Neil's show.

Everything Louder's Layout

I can't remember whether this was on the old blog but following Everything Louder's honour of winning Celebrity Site of The Day for 8th June 2011, I looked at some of the other recipients of the award. Some of the other sites were really pretty so that got me thinking about how I can improve Everything Louder. As much as I wanted a pretty site at the time, it wasn't going to work for the subject matter so I experimented a bit and came up with a new idea.

With the old layout, it was only the galleries that got updated regularly and there was no news or anything like that on the site. A lot of these other sites had news and after trying to find ways to encorporate it into the current site layout, I decided to try another system altogether. I decided to experiment with Wordpress which was used on a lot of the other fansites and came up with a layout which I put out to a few friends to evaluate. Overall the response was good and so on Monday 13th June, the new layout was launched on the domain. It was easier to transfer it over than I thought it would be and the beauty of this system is that I don't have to be tied to the one computer to do site updates.

The end of an era for DavidStiersFan

DavidStiersFan was first established in July 2005 and was a website dedicated to the American actor David Ogden Stiers. The site remained reasonably popular until 2009 and whilst several alternatives were thought of to regenerate the site, lack of work from David Ogden Stiers made things difficult. For the last year the site's future has been uncertain and now the site has come offline for the final time. The DavidStiersFan name, for the remainder of it's registration will link to the Facebook Page.

Like Major Winchester's Website, that came offline in January, I had felt a sentimentality towards it as it was one of my first websites but there was little point in keeping it for the sake of sentimentality.

Moving From Wordpress

BatAngel's Blog used to be a WordPress thing but to tell thr truth I wasn't very happy with it being there as I seemed to end up with no end of spam as comments and other than disabling comments altogether, there was no way of stopping this. Not only that but I was always having to update the software and that got boring. I already knew Blogger was relatively easy to use as Everything Louder's Blog uses Blogger.
Originally BatAngel's blog was going to be about website updates but I thought that was boring so some other relevant stuff might get posted here too.